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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  The heat is on G7 leaders to clean up supply chains
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The heat is on G7 leaders to clean up supply chains

A group of NGOs want to build on gains they perceived during the G7 summit in Germany in 2015, when G7 leaders collectively pledged to promote 'responsible supply chains'

A file photo of workers trying to rescue trapped garment workers in the Rana Plaza building, which collapsed in Dhaka on 24 April 2013. This pressure by the NGOs is timely, coming as it does just after the third anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse. Photo: Reuters Premium
A file photo of workers trying to rescue trapped garment workers in the Rana Plaza building, which collapsed in Dhaka on 24 April 2013. This pressure by the NGOs is timely, coming as it does just after the third anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse. Photo: Reuters

A group of 60 influential non-governmental organizations have targeted global supply chains, and are leveraging the forthcoming G7 summit in Japan this May. In a joint statement, the group has expressed concern that the summit will “fail to adequately address the grave human rights violations and environmental destruction that continue throughout global supply chains".

This pressure is timely, coming as it does just after the third anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka that killed at least 1,100 workers on 24 April 2013. That sweatshop horror linking top garment labels of Europe and North America endures, with several owners of such labels yet to own up responsibility or offer aid to families of the dead and those injured.

They aren’t responsible, the argument goes, vociferously pushed, among others, by Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwati. Right after the disaster, the globalization guru insisted in a column in The New York Times that “blame must be assigned to Bangladesh and not to the brands. Since the factories were locally owned and operated, the blame surely belonged to their owners and managers, not to their clients any more than to those of us who purchased the garments at home or abroad". To their credit, most businesses associated with the disaster had—in the face of global outrage—the grace and sense to ditch the professor’s advice and offer recompense, and work with civil society organizations to establish remedial mechanisms. In the business and human rights universe of hard-fought action and painfully accumulated gain, this is progress.

The NGOs want to build on gains they perceived during the G7 summit in Germany in 2015, when G7 leaders collectively pledged to promote “responsible supply chains". This grouping, which the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations terms an “informal bloc of industrialized democracies" and includes the US, Germany, UK, Japan, France, Canada and Italy (Russia was ditched in 2014 after it annexed Crimea), publicly supported the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This rests on what the UN terms the “three pillars": the state’s duty to protect human rights; corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and the “need for greater access to remedy for victims of business-related abuse".

Naturally, these principles and “pillars" apply to all countries, but the G7 is where both maximum wealth accrues and where maximum offending global supply chains have their medusa heads. The NGO collective now wants to press G7 leaders to take ahead their 2015 commitment to “increase transparency, the identification and prevention of human rights risks, and the strengthening of grievance mechanisms to promote better working conditions", and of the need to urge the private sector to “implement human rights due diligence".

The NGO communiqué is also sharp towards those willfully slothful in ticking off erring businesses: “In particular, we urge those members of the G7 that have not yet started the process of preparing a National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights—Canada and Japan—to start do this without delay."

Japan will have its work cut out during the summit as host nation with multiple opportunities of being embarrassed in front of the world. There are several major Japanese NGOs in the collective that plans to pressure G7 leaders: Caux Round Table-Japan, CSO Network Japan, Fair Trade Forum Japan, Fairtrade Label Japan, Fair Trade Nagoya Network, Friends of the Earth Japan and Not For Sale Japan, among others. The other globally-oriented NGOs in the G7 collective include the Association of German Development and Humanitarian Aid NGOs (VENRO), Global Poverty Project, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, Mekong Watch, Rainforest Action Network, Transparency International, and my runaway favourite in terms of intent, Stop Mad Mining.

The NGOs insist that “G7 countries should require, by law, that companies implement human rights due diligence in accordance with the highest international human rights and environmental standards". This isn’t impossible. In September 2013, the UK government presented to that country’s parliament a document titled Good Business: Implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Among other things, it promised to “implement UK government obligations to protect human rights within UK jurisdiction where business enterprises are involved" and “support access to effective remedy for victims of human rights abuse involving business enterprises within UK jurisdiction". Effective 1 October of that year, the government also issued a clarification of the UK’s Companies Act 2006 to ensure “that company directors will include human rights issues in their annual reports".

More on this in May.

Sudeep Chakravarti’s books include Clear.Hold.Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict situations in South Asia that directly affect business, runs on Fridays.

Respond to this column at rootcause@livemint.com

To read all of Sudeep Chakravarti’s earlier columns, go to www.livemint.com/rootcause

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Published: 29 Apr 2016, 12:49 AM IST
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